Day: June 1, 2018

UPDATE Sept. 28th: Please note that this Bento mesh head is no longer available for free. For a current, up-to-date list of free or inexpensive options for mesh avatar heads and bodies for female Second Life avatars, please see this blogpost. For a current, up-to-date list of free and inexpensive options for male mesh avatar heads and bodies, please see this blogpost.

Over the past year, Akeruka has had four different dollarbie Bento mesh heads—two female, and two male—as group gifts for members of the [AK] Heads, News & Support group; the group join fee was L$150, so that works out to 38.5 Linden dollars per head, an amazing deal! So you might want to join this group, in case they decide to offer other dollarbie deals on Bento mesh heads.

Well, Akeruka has just announced a new anniversary group gift to members of their group: a fully-adjustable, fully-featured Bento mesh head for female avatars, called Maia! It is available for FREE if you join the [AK] Heads, News & Support group. You pay the vendor panel L$1, and it automatically refunds your Linden dollar.

The fee to join this group is only L$150, so you get a beautiful Bento mesh head for only L$150 total, which has the same level of features of other Bento mesh heads which retail for as much as L$5,000! This is an absolutely outstanding deal, and one you should take advantage of, especially if you were sitting on the fence about upgrading your avatar to a Bento mesh head because of the high cost of other brands such as Catwa and Lelutka.

And, if you were lucky enough to be able to pick up all 5 dollarbie heads offered as Akeruka group gifts (the 4 previous offers and now this current offer), then your cost per Bento mesh head works out to only L$31 each! That’s AMAZING!

You do nothave to pay extra for body skin appliers! The package includes a full set of skin appliers for Maitreya, Belleza, and Slink mesh bodies to match the ten included skintones of the Maia head. There are also Omega appliers for use with any Omega-compatible mesh avatar body.

The head comes with a HUD which controls the skin tones (10 included), the hairbase and eyebrows (white, blonde, red, brown and black), eyelashes, eyeshadows, and lipsticks, plus blush and freckles layers. There’s also an animations HUD and a teeth HUD, which includes vampire teeth among other options! Here’s a look at the animations HUD, which features 12 full face motion capture (mocap) animations, plus another 18 available expressions:

New to this Akeruka mesh head are mesh eyes, which are also controlled on the HUD:

Obviously, the Akeruka sim is very crowded. Rather than trying over and over again to get into a packed sim when it is over its avatar capacity, purchase the Get Me In Teleport Hammer for free from the SL Marketplace. This handy tool allows you to automate your teleport requests, so you can go do something else while it keeps trying to get your avatar into a crowded sim! You’ll be alerted with a special sound when you finally arrive at your destination.

UPDATE 5:21 p.m.: There is a known issue with the Belleza skin appliers included in the Maia head package. They work with older Belleza bodies, but they do not seem to work with the latest version 5.0 of the Belleza mesh avatar bodies (the update with the Bento hands). The work-around is to use the Belleza Omega relay and the Omega appliers, which do work correctly. That is what I did in the last picture and I was very satisfied with the result!

UPDATE 7:43 p.m.: I just learned from the group chat for the [AK] Heads, News & Support group that this group gift will be available until June 15th, so you’ve got a bit of time to get down there to pick it up. After that, it will be available for its regular price of L$4,999. Thank you for the information, SlackGirl and Czarina Beth!

UPDATE June 2nd: I have discovered that, like the last couple of times when Akeruka offered a group gift female mesh head, that they will also be offering a malegroup gift mesh head right after that! The male group gift head will be a group gift starting on June 16th, and the offer will last for a two week period as well. So join that group now! Thanks for letting me know, Tay Moon!